Posts with «vr» label

While touchscreens are nice, wouldn’t it be even better if you could simply wave your hand to your computer to get it to do what you want? That’s the idea behind this Iron Man-inspired gesture control device by B. Aswinth Raj.

The DIY system uses an Arduino Nano mounted to a disposable glove, along with hall effect sensors, a magnet attached to the thumb, and a Bluetooth module. This smart glove uses the finger-mounted sensors as left and right mouse buttons, and has a blue circle in the middle of the palm that the computer can track via a webcam and a Processing sketch to generate a cursor position.

You can see it demonstrated in the video below, drawing a stick man literally by hand, and also controlling an LED on the Nano. Check out this write-up for code and more info on the build!

[Florian] has been putting a lot of work into VR controllers that can be used without interfering with a regular mouse + keyboard combination, and his most recent work has opened the door to successfully emulating a Vive VR controller in Steam VR. He uses Arduino-based custom hardware on the hand, a Leap Motion controller, and fuses the data in software.

We’ve seen [Florian]’s work before in successfully combining a Leap Motion with additional hardware sensors. The idea is to compensate for the fact that the Leap Motion sensor is not very good at detecting some types of movement, such as tilting a fist towards or away from yourself — a movement similar to aiming a gun up or down. At the same time, an important goal is for any added hardware to leave fingers and hands free.

[Florian]’s DIY VR hand controls emulate the HTC Vive controllers in Valve’s Steam VR Tracking with a software chain that works with his custom hardware. His DIY controller doesn’t need to be actively held because by design it grips the hand, leaving fingers free to do other tasks like typing or gesturing.

Last time we saw [Florian]’s work, development was still heavy and there wasn’t any source code shared, but there’s now a git repository for the project with everything you’d need to join the fun. He adds that “I see a lot of people with Wii nunchucks looking to do this. With a few edits to my FreePIE script, they should be easily be able to enable whatever buttons/orientation data they want.”

At the Atmel booth at Maker Faire, they were showing off a few very cool bits and baubles. We’ve got a post on the WiFi shield in the works, but the most impressive person at the booth was [Quin]. He has a company, he’s already shipping products, and he has a few projects already in the works. What were you doing at 13?

[Quin]‘s Qduino Mini is your basic Arduino compatible board with a LiPo charging circuit. There’s also a ‘fuel gauge’ of sorts for the battery. The project will be hitting Kickstarter sometime next month, and we’ll probably put that up in a links post.

Oh, [Quin] was also rocking some awesome kicks at the Faire. Atmel, I’m trying to give you money for these shoes, but you’re not taking it.

[Sophie] had a really cool installation at the faire, and notably something that was first featured on hackaday.io. Basically, it’s a virtually reality Segway, built with an Oculus, Leap Motion, a Wobbleboard, an Android that allows you to cruise on everyone’s favorite barely-cool balancing scooter through a virtual landscape.

This project was a collaboration between [Sophie], [Takafumi Ide], [Adelle Lin], and [Martha Hipley]. The virtual landscape was built in Unity, displayed on the Oculus, controlled with an accelerometer on a phone, and has input with a Leap Motion. There are destructible and interactable things in the environment that can be pushed around with the Leap Motion, and with the helmet-mounted fans, you can feel the wind in your hair as you cruise over the landscape on your hovering Segway-like vehicle. This is really one of the best VR projects we’ve ever seen.

So you couldn't get your hands on a nice virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift, but you'd still like something a little fancier than a cardboard display. Are you out of luck? Not if Noe Ruiz has anything to say about it. He has posted instructions at Adafruit for do-it-yourself 3D-printed goggles that can be used for either VR or as a simple wearable screen. The design mates an Arduino Micro mini computer with a display, a motion sensor and lenses; the 3D printing both adds a level of polish and lets you tailor the fit to your cranium. This definitely isn't the cheapest project (about $231 in parts) or the easiest, but it will give you head-tracking VR without having to wait for Oculus, Samsung or Sony to put out finished devices of their own. If you're up to the challenge, you'll find everything you need at the source link.